I Wash My Hands In Innocency

He made it well. That is the part that will not sit still.

It took him most of a year. It was careful work and it was honest work and there is not a single decision in it he would take back on its own terms. He was proud of it in the quiet way a man is proud of a thing that took a year.

And then somebody else decided what it was for.

Not wickedly, as far as he can tell. Differently. A use he would not have picked, arrived at by people with reasons he was never given, and by the time he heard about it the thing had been doing it for four months.

He is sixty seven now and it was a long time ago and it still turns up. Usually in the evening. Usually when he is tired and the radio is off.

What he says, and he has said it to almost nobody, is that he cannot work out whether he is allowed to be proud of the year. It is as though the second decision reached backwards and took the first one with it, so that the care he put in has become part of an account he never agreed to.

He has prayed about it. What he has never been able to do is separate the two halves, because they are attached in the world, and so he assumes they must be attached in him.

You may have your own year. Something you made properly, that went somewhere you would not have sent it, and a doubt that has quietly worked its way back down the chain and settled on your own hands.

Washing the hands that did the thing

There is a line in a psalm that is a physical action, and I want you to see how specific it is.

I will wash mine hands in innocency: so will I compass thine altar, O LORD.Psalm 26:6

He washes his hands. Not his record, not his reputation, not the story of what happened afterwards. His hands. The parts of him that did the work.

That is a very deliberate image and it turns up all through the Old Testament. Washing hands is about what a person's own hands have done, and it is bounded on purpose, because a conscience with no boundary is not a more sensitive conscience, it is one that cannot function.

You are able to be clean in the part that was actually yours, and the part that was actually yours is the making. Psalm 26:6 washes the hands rather than the whole account, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man be honest about his own work without answering for somebody else's decision.

Now I want to be careful, because I am not going to tell you that what happened afterwards does not matter. It does. It clearly mattered to you for years, and that says something good about you rather than something anxious.

But look at what actually happened. Two decisions were made. You made the first one and you made it well. Somebody else made the second one, without you, for reasons you were never told. And in your own head those two have been welded into one act with your name on the whole of it.

You are not the author of the second decision, and you were never given the standing to make it. The written word washes hands in innocency and leaves the rest to God, and the Holy Spirit does not require a man to answer for a room he was not in.

Here is the honest half. Nothing here undoes what was done, and nothing here says the use was fine, and I am not offering you a verdict on the people involved, because I do not know them and neither of us is in a position to hand one out.

What is being offered is narrower and it is what you have actually needed for years. You are allowed to be glad about the year. The care was real care. It did not stop being care when somebody else did something with the result.

And there is a part only you can do, and it is worth doing with your body, because this has lived in your hands for a long time. Water, hands, a slow count, and one sentence naming what was yours.